


new waves and old stones

by leonshardt



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Gen, Post-Game, angel lives AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 19:08:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5977936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonshardt/pseuds/leonshardt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Projection: The Guardian Angel survives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	new waves and old stones

Projection: the Guardian Angel survives.

She knows this one already—the truth is, she was never meant to get out alive. In the time before, she had dismissed the scant projections that suggested her survival, the possibility that she would leave Control Core Angel as anything other than a corpse. Probabilities could be manipulated. Probabilities could be ignored.

Afterwards when she was too weak to walk out of Marcus’s gun shop herself, the vault hunters half-carried, half dragged her all the way to the Crimson Raider HQ. It must have been a strange sight for the residents of Sanctuary: a group of singed and battered vault hunters limping back to base, all leaning on one another for support in a tangle of limbs and groans of pain. With her arm hooked around Maya’s elbow and her head resting on Axton’s shoulder, Angel looked up into the long stretch of Pandora’s sky, blue into blue and white, and for the first time in years she felt something wistful and hard finally bubble up in her throat.

Oh, how she had missed the sky.

 

-

 

Projection: She saves Jack’s life.

Angel no longer has the power reserves to run this particular scenario anymore. She tried maybe, once or twice, in the small space of her own mind. Not a projection, then, without the artificiality of a processing network jacked into her body. Something more private. A fantasy. A maybe.

She briefly wonders if they could have gotten out, cut their losses and left Pandora and all its screaming winds and howling monsters before Jack’s ambition to tame it consumed everything she had left to give up. All this time and she just wanted to get out, and Jack could never forgive her for it. Could never forgive himself for it, either.

_Promise me you’ll kill him, friend._

Under a hail of bullets the vault hunter had looked straight into her eyes and nodded, and in that moment she had been so completely sure that she was going to die then and there that she never stopped to consider, _what would be after?_

 

-

 

Projection: She can’t save her mother.

Confirmed. Angel doesn’t touch this one anymore.

 

-

 

Projection: The vault hunters forgive her, eventually.

 _Unlikely,_ Angel thinks. She knows it’s hard for them to look at her and see anything but a tool shaped solely by Jack, a complicated mess of deceit and manipulation and guilt. Maybe someday they’ll come around. She’s not holding her breath.

It’s easy to see the wound in all of them. Easiest to pinpoint in Lilith, with her eyes still raw and red-rimmed from loss. Roland’s absence hurts like an open sore in all of them, but for Lilith it was something especially personal. Something too vicious and harrowing to put into words. Lilith holds herself more guarded than any of them, with the way she keeps a wary hand on the unmarked flesh above her stomach as if expecting to find a knife tearing at her insides. For anyone but a siren, the skin there would be scarred and knotted like so many memories of twisted blades. In a moment Lilith catches her staring and straightens up a little, dropping her hand to her side. Angel swallows hard and tries not to meet Lilith’s eyes, and does not discredit either of them by apologizing.

“It should have been me,” Lilith says finally, a month after Angel’s arrival in Sanctuary. “He told me not to come, and I didn’t listen. It should have been me _._ ” She’s looking at her hands, clenching and unclenching her fists, her marked skin rippling with tension. Angel bites back the _I know._ She did know, didn’t she? In the vast sprawl of projections and probabilities and scenarios, she knew that Lilith would eventually take her place as the key’s catalyst. Maybe she wouldn’t make it out either. Only Jack knew for sure, or he thought he did. And that’s all he needed, really.

“She’ll come around,” Mordecai says. “It just takes time.” Mordecai has been drinking less and less these days. _Can’t look after Talon if I’m drunk off my ass,_ he says, and the raptor on his arm screeches affectionately. Mordecai had donated most of his rakk ale reserves to Moxxi’s Bar. In a time like this, it was sure to be gone by the end of the weekend.

Angel’s own addiction runs a little deeper than that. Sometimes she catches a whiff of unrefined eridium clinging to the surfaces of Sanctuary like the tingle of static after a phaseshift. _No,_ she thinks, _No more._ Her hands shake. Jack had been pumping the stuff into her body since she was a girl, and where did it leave her now? No one’s guardian, certainly not an angel. Pieces of the person she could have once been. Something small and broken.

She feels somehow more hollow and strange without the tubes and ports and eridium injectors feeding into her.

“Only way to go from here is up,” Brick says, tracing the night sky with one thick finger. Angel thinks of the map that sprung from the vault key, all those unopened vaults spread across the galaxy and twinkling between the stars like promises.

 

-

 

When Angel is strong enough to walk around the Crimson Raider HQ unassisted, a couple of the vault hunters take it upon themselves to teach her how to drive.

“You know the first thing I was gonna do when I landed on Pandora was get a car,” Gaige says, popping her bubblegum with a _smack_. “The kids back in high school always made fun of me for not having a license, but look at me now! _Rolling_ in digistructed rides, baby.” The mechromancer flicks the Catch-a-Ride screen and steps back as an electric-blue technical spawns at the front of Ellie’s garage. Krieg lumbers off to hop into the truck’s back, motioning at the girls to join him in the front. After a brief moment of hesitation, Angel climbs into the driver’s seat. There are so many levers and buttons to keep track of. She pokes at a few of them experimentally, trying to adjust to the strange feeling of using her hands.

 _You can do this_ , Angel says to herself. She’s hacked far more complex machines than a bandit technical, and she’s observed the vault hunters drive for hours and hours across the continent. She can figure this out. She puts her hands on the steering wheel.

“No seatbelt?” She asks.

“No seatbelt,” Gaige confirms, and Krieg roars with laughter.

It takes a few hours and much coaching from Gaige, but pretty soon she’s got the general hang of it. “Oooo, watch out for spiderants,” Gaige says after Angel crushes a few spiderlings under her wheels.

“INSURANCE FRAUD!” Krieg screams from the backseat, and Angel feels a tentative smile form on her lips.

The Dust is so wide. So much bigger than the single, sterile room she had been confined to for so many years. _I can go anywhere I want to go,_ Angel thinks with a bit of exhilaration. The wind whipping across her face tastes like freedom. Over the sandy hills Angel can just see the sun starting to set, orange rays painting over Pandora’s landscape in a warm glow. Gaige is starting to nod off against the cracked leather of her seat, and behind them Krieg is unusually quiet, his good eye staring with dark intensity at the horizon.

Krieg mutters something so softly that Angel almost doesn’t catch it. “New life,” he says, and against the roar of the engine and the whip of the wind Angel turns the phrase over in her head.

Projection: Her life is just getting started.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I must have lived a lifetime without you  
> You must’ve ended up somebody’s angel  
> I remember you loving the radio  
> [ New waves, and old stones](https://youtu.be/3s5YCsSgyWs)


End file.
